The core interest of rural finance practitioners is to ensure that rural people, especially poor rural people, have access to financial services. However, a bank account is of little use to someone if they have no means of securing a livelihood. So development oriented financial institutions find they increasingly need to focus on livelihood promotion if they really wish to help the poorest members of society find a way out of poverty.

Livelihood interventions may take a spatial approach, e.g. addressing problems in a degraded watershed, or a segmental approach, e.g. addressing problems of the landless or the disabled, or a sectoral approach, e.g. addressing problems of dairy farmers or cotton growers. A holistic approach involving a range of cross-cutting interventions is more complex but may be essential to address the problems of the poorest or people living in remote areas.